Global Warming: the Guilty Men

I don't always agree with Peter Oborne, but I think his diatribe (written with Frances Weaver) against the Guilty Men responsible for trying to drag us into the Great Euro Swindle may be the most brilliant piece of sustained, righteous invective I've read all year.

Very rarely in political history has any faction or movement enjoyed such a complete and crushing victory as the Conservative Eurosceptics. The field is theirs. They were not merely right about the single currency, the greatest economic issue of our age — they were right for the right reasons. They foresaw with lucid, prophetic accuracy exactly how and why the euro would bring with it financial devastation and social collapse.

But possibly even more brilliant than Oborne's and Weaver's thoroughly brilliant polemic is the introduction written by Peter Jay. I'd never thought much of Jay before: just another of those soft-left apparatchiks doing very nicely out of the System, I used vaguely to imagine. His intro, though, suggests I may have misjudged him.

Jay is fascinating on the subject of Jean Monnet, architect of the EU socialist superstate. Young Jay met him as a 15 year old schoolboy at a dinner hosted in Paris for his father and was not impressed. Monnet was perfectly frank about what he wanted: a United States of Europe run by mostly French technocrats.

What interested me most, though, was this bit:

In choosing the title of their book from that famous earlier study of national betrayal by the nation's elite, the authors of this book have chosen well. Like the appeasers, those who after 1950 worked to deliver their country into the hands of a foreign power – and the particular institutions in which they served – were not individually wicked or vile, though there was indeed something diabolical about the combined arrogance and dirty tricks deployed by the Europhile establishment against anyone who refused to profess the new faith.

It was, my father told me, an exact re-run of the appeasement period in the 1930s when dissent was greeted with suffocating ostracism and personal calumny, reminiscent of the fate of religious non-conformists in earlier times. It recalled too the treatment, at least on the left, of any who did not at least pretend to support CND. Its spokesmen became past masters of a special kind of double-speak, fudging of all facts and ducking all issues, what Kipling had earlier called "the truthful well-weighed answer that tells the blacker lie."

Though this isn’t referred to in the text, it occurs to Guido that many of the same guilty men are currently making the same kind of hysterical claims about global warming.

Indeed, and using the same techniques too. Looking back now at some of the smears directed over the years at Eurosceptics by the Liberal Establishment, it almost beggars belief that they could get away with such calumnies while yet maintaining any kind of claim to reason, balance or authority.

The spectacle is both nauseating and pathetic: nauseating because this heterogeneous rump of Thatcherites, little Englanders, xenophobes and eccentric constitutionalists appears to have no concept of loyalty; pathetic because they have no alternative agenda. In their conceit they are convinced they know better than the Government (and the Opposition) where this country's true interests lie. But what vision do they substitute? Not, to be sure, of a perfidious Albion notorious for going back on treaties that it has signed; nor of a country whose outdated notions of sovereignty led either to Britain being marginalised in Europe, or to a historic undermining of the EC's role as a bulwark against resurgent nationalism. Yet those are both likely outcomes. The Europhobes' idea of the EC reverting to a mere Common Market is a naive anachronism.

Note that this is an editorial – not a signed Op Ed written by some rabid integrationist, but one of those unsigned leading articles in which, by tradition at least, a newspaper strives to set out its stall as a thoughtful, balanced authority on matters of great import.

How did they get away with this stuff? It's a question I find myself asking time and again of all those establishment figures using every manner of dirty trick to promote the Man Made Global Warming scam. As we saw with Appeasement and we saw again with the Euro, foremost among these dirty tricks is a relentless campaign to discredit those who disagree with them by implying that they are mad, extreme, out-of-touch, unrepresentative, ill-informed. What's depressing, as we saw with the Appeasers and again with those Europhiles, is there is no great penalty for having been so totally wrong. Satisfying though it be for those of us on the right side to see Oborne and Weaver fingering the Guilty Men – Andrew Rawnsley, Chris Patten, Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Michael Heseltine, Ken Clarke, Charles Kennedy, Danny Alexander, Niall FitzGerald, Adair Turner, David Simon, et al – you can be sure that those Guilty Men won't actually be experiencing even the slightest frisson of guilt or embarrassment about the decent people whose reputations they have helped destroy, or the damage they have done to our economy, our democracy and our freedoms.

It will be same, unfortunately, when the Great Global Warming Scam finally unravels for good. There will be no payback for the dodgy scientists, green activists, shyster politicians, rent-seeking businessmen, faceless technocrats and media useful idiots who exploited and stoked this, the biggest and most expensive outbreak of mass hysteria in history.

All those of us on the right side of the argument will have is the satisfaction of being able to list the Guilty Men, just has Oborne has done.